FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

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Italian Economist Bagnai, Newly Elected Senator, Promotes Glass-Steagall for Italy

March 15, 2018 (EIRNS)—Well-known economist Alberto Bagnai has been elected to the Italian Senate on the Lega slate. In a long video interview with videoblog Byoblu, he emphasizes Glass-Steagall as part of the explanation of why he, a leftist intellectual, joined a “right-wing” party like the Lega. The left is divided into two camps, Bagnai says: the willing executioners, who are in the government, and the useful idiots of finance capital, such as those who call for power to the people.

“I am not prejudicially against finance. We have been stalked by people who insist that money is the feces of the devil—somewhere between St. Bernardine of Siena and a mental hospital. But finance must play a function in a capitalist economy. However, since the left joined the government ... this function has become hypertrophic. Finance has become a neoplasm and one must deal with it. In the Lega program there are some corrective measures; for instance, separation between commercial and investment banks,”

the classical description of FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall Act.